For businesses that are targeting consumers, social media is a great platform to communicate with their customers, raise brand awareness, manage customer service and promote offers and sales. If you don't have much of a marketing budget, social media can be used for free, or you can put some money into it to advertise in order to improve your performance on social media and reach more potential customers.

The seventh Star Wars movie hit the cinemas at the end of 2015, and people of all ages and genders around the world couldn't wait to see this latest instalment. The movie was always going to be successful on its opening weekend, with all of the hype and nostalgia generated by fans of the old movie, but the fact that it smashed box office records by earning $238 million during its opening weekend is also down to the marketing from Disney leading up to the film's release.

The marketing methods that you should use depend a great deal on whom you are targeting as your ideal customer. One simple way of categorising your target market is whether you are aiming your product/service at businesses (B2B) or at consumers (B2C).

An important consideration when researching and planning your marketing is your customer; who are they, where do they work, what do they do in their spare time, where do they live, what do they spend their money on. It’s a good idea to set a clearly defined target demographic that you’re aiming your product/service at, and researching as much as you can about the people or businesses within this demographic.

Last week we talked about marketing research and why all businesses should be focusing on this at the beginning of the year to improve their marketing and grow their business in the year ahead. In this blog we'll be providing you with some more practical tips on how to get started with marketing research and analysis.

The New Year is here which means it's a great time to take stock of your marketing and plan for the year ahead to try and improve your marketing efforts in order to continue growing your business successfully. Or perhaps you've decided to start up a new business in 2016, and need to do the initial research to develop your company.

This month we will be looking at a number of areas that will help you put some clear plans in place for your marketing in 2016. In this week's blog we will look the first step; how to develop a plan and strategy for your marketing and some tools you can use to analyse and improve your marketing.

So, another year has been and gone. Hopefully it has been an enjoyable and prosperous one for you all and your businesses have continued to grow and develop. Now is the time to make plans for next year and figure out how to continue this growth throughout 2016. Even if you have had a great year, it doesn't mean that sticking to doing things exactly the way you've done them this year is going to work, and there is always room for improvement.

We'd just like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Hopefully you've all had a prosperous year and can now take some time off over the holidays to relax, eat and be merry. If you are working over Christmas then try to take a moment to think about next year and what you can do to continue to improve your business. But don't work too hard!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Shamshad, Madeleine and Rebecca!